I first met Petra Wille, a fellow product coach, at Mind the Product and was immediately impressed with her work. While I tend to focus on helping teams, Petra’s work centers around helping product leaders—the people who manage product managers. The people in these roles don’t always come from a product background, so they may […]
Show Your Work: How to Justify Your Decisions & Get Stakeholder Buy-In
Last month, I spoke at Mind the Product San Francisco. The following transcript is how the speech was written and does not match the talk exactly. — I want you to take a minute—think back to elementary school when you were learning multiplication tables. Don’t worry; I’m not going to make you do any math. […]
The Art of Managing Stakeholders Through Product Discovery
So, you’re feeling pretty good about your product discovery habits. You are interviewing customers, iterating on prototypes, running sound experiments, and your team is gaining confidence that you are on a path to reach your desired outcome. It feels like you’ve reached product team nirvana. There’s only one problem. You shared your progress with your […]
Managing Product Teams for Success
I’ve been thinking about the challenges of managing product teams by outcomes. Most leaders want their teams to have the autonomy to go after an outcome, but they struggle with trusting that their teams will do the right things. Most teams want that autonomy, but they struggle with communicating their progress toward an uncertain outcome. […]
Video: How One Chief Product Officer Is Reinventing Product Management At Her Company
A few months ago, I sat down with Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, to talk about her team, how they work, and how she stays current in the fast-moving world of product management. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Hope for the past two years and I am thoroughly impressed by her leadership […]
What Your Product Team Says About Your Company Values
Are you committed to creating a great user experience? Do you believe in data-driven product development? Are you motivated to create products that your customers love? I’m guessing most of you answered yes to all three of those questions. Let me ask you a different set of questions. How many engineers does your company have? […]
Introducing My Intern to Interaction Design Is Fun
I’m working with a design intern this summer. It’s a lot of fun. She doesn’t have a design background. She’s right out of college, a dual major in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Science. She didn’t even know what interaction design was before she saw the job listing. She was just open to learning about […]
